Pragmaticism 101
Abortion. Should be allowable until the pregnancy is viable outside the body...
Neo-Cons. I miss the old Conservatives, without the Christianity, without huge deficit spending...
Liberals. I miss the old Liberals, with a spine, defending civil rights.
Homosexuality. Deserve equal rights.
Guns. Guns are idiotic, they serve no purpose except for killing.
Iraq War. Illegal war, that we need to finish by arming our puppet Iraqi regime and leaving. Kurds deserve own country.
Evolution. Evolution is science. Intelligent design is theology.
Neo-Cons. I miss the old Conservatives, without the Christianity, without huge deficit spending...
Liberals. I miss the old Liberals, with a spine, defending civil rights.
Homosexuality. Deserve equal rights.
Guns. Guns are idiotic, they serve no purpose except for killing.
Iraq War. Illegal war, that we need to finish by arming our puppet Iraqi regime and leaving. Kurds deserve own country.
Evolution. Evolution is science. Intelligent design is theology.
posted by BigBuddhaPuppy at 1:05 PM
10 Comments:
Agree with you on everything except abortion. What happens if some medical technique makes 2 day old fetuses viable outside the body?
Anyways, the way I look at it, since I am not sure when life begins, I would rather err on the side of caution. I mean, how would you feel if, a few years from now, they found that whatever constitutes life begins at the moment of conception...that there is a rudimentary consciousness (or whatever)? Wouldn't that mean you supported killing helpless infants.
I hate the anti-abortionist rant as much as I hate the illogical "let's-just-cut-fetuses-apart" but "hey- -capital-punishment-is-evil" crowd.
If that happens, we revise the law.
If that happens, we revise our thinking.
We can do "what ifs" until the end of time, the best we can do is what with we have at this moment.
What if, we figure out in the future that life doesn't start until consciousness occurs, and consciousness doesn't occur until there is a brain to "experience" consciousness"?
I dislike "the all or nothing crowd"...
Abortion should be last ditch birth control method.
As for capital punishment, only for the most violent of crimes.
Okay...you and I have the same opinion on this, but we come to totally different conclusions. So what if we find out that life begins when there is a brain? The worst thing we have done in my scenario is to force women to have kids they don't want (they can put them up for adoption in those cases). That's hardly as bad as potentially killing living babies.
I mean, really, this is Logic 101: We don't know, ergo, how can we take the risk?
I don't think that woman should be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when there is the option of getting rid of a few nonsentient cells...we can go on what we know, that is until certain parts of the brain are developed, the pregnancy is not a sentient being. There shouldn't be an issue of ethicity/morality/legality of an abortion in this case. I am sure religion persons will try to push their individual/group viewpoints upon women. It is an individuals' choice.
Killing living babies...if something isn't alive, then you can't kill it...
sen·tient (snshnt, -sh-nt)
adj. Having sense perception; conscious.
Experiencing sensation or feeling
I agree with your definition. Problem is, women can have abortions into the 6 month. At that time, the brain is there. So...I agree with early term abortions (1-2 months). I get a little nervous around 3 months and up.
By the way, I also have a problem with the "theory" of evolution. I don't believe in Intelligent Design, but I also find too many holes in the theories surrounding evolution (it's still all conjecture with no real proof). Scientists who angrily defend evolution are, to me, not real scientists. Science should be based on empirical results and duplication of results. Neither is possible with evolutionary theories.
"88% of abortions occur during the first 6 to 12 weeks of pregnancy."
http://womensissues.about.com/cs/abortionstats/a/aaabortionstats.htm
Viability, at the earliest is 24 weeks, but the widely accepted standard is 28 weeks...
"Abortions after fetal viability are extremely rare. Half of the 1.5 million abortions in the U.S. each year take place within the first eight weeks of pregancy; nine in 10 occur within the first 12 weeks. Less than 1 percent are performed after 20 weeks. Some 300-600 abortions -- or up to four one-hundredths of 1 percent -- are performed after 26 weeks."
http://www.ppacca.org/site/pp.asp?c=kuJYJeO4F&b=139571
In these 300 to 600 cases, there wasn't any documentation on whether the procedure was due to medical concerns of the mothers or baby...
The point is, if you agree with the viability argument, then the abortion is pretty much okay as it is written...
theory - A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.
It is not "conjecture", it is a "theory"...
What holes? Can you disprove this theory with testable facts?
Well...no...I can't. But your definition of a theory is that it "...has been repeatedly tested...and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena". Evolutionary theory doesn't predict anything. It looks at fossilized remains and tries to determine linkages between entities millions of years apart. It has NEVER been tested at the macro level (oh, the micro, small changes in an animals physiology have been made, but there is still no proven link between, say, apes and man from an evolutionary theory...they THINK there is, but there is no proof).
What evolutionary principles about the creation of complex life from single cell organisms has ever been reproduced (i.e. repeatedly tested) in the laboratory?
Asking me to disprove a theory with testable facts is ridiculous. If I theorized that we all were created from some benevolent, omnipotent god and asked you to disprove it...is your failure to disprove it indication that my theory is correct? The onus, in this example, is for me to PROVE my theory with empirical data. Just as it is your (and evolutionary fanatics) responsibility to prove evolution with testable and repeatable scientific experimentation.
When a lab somewhere can show me a single-cell organism evolve into a multi-cell complex organism spontaneously, then I will trust the theory more. Right now, it is untestable and, therefore, nothing more than a quasi-religious, faith-based belief....sound familiar?
"Science relies on facts, which are either data gathered through observation or instances in which some phenomenon has been tested and verified so many times that there is no longer good reason to suspect any variation in outcome. Even in this case a fact is not immutable, since it is always possible for new evidence to be introduced that will overturn a long-established fact. Evolution is a fact in the respect that we have hard data – an ever-expanding fossil record – proving that species have changed over time; dinosaurs, early mammals, Trilobites, and other forms no longer exist as living species. The exact mechanism by which these changes occurred (e.g. natural selection and environmental pressures) is the realm of evolutionary theory and is based on interpretation of that fossil record and other available data."
"Scientific theories are provisional and are supported by evidence or data"
There is no scientific data that can support God. But there is scientific data, fossils, dna, rna, genotides, breeding, etc, that does support scientifically, evolution.
Nothing religious about knowing the idea of evolution could change...nothing faith based in testing data for results...the testing is the billions of pieces of data that scientifically supports the conclusion that natural selection, evolution, adaption takes place..
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html
I agree with the idea behind evolution...but I won't blindly subscribe to it as is. For instance, think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs, since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar. (Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?) It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly. Death is usually a discouragement to reproduction.
Tell me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the theory fails.
There is a lot of evidence of small level changes in a species...but I cannot believe that every species, every insect, every animal, evolved from some single cell organisms. I don't believe in God, per se, but I do believe that there is something missing in the theory of evolution.
What I also don't like is being called a redneck (not that you did this) or an idiot (again, not you) for not putting my whole faith in the theory. Like I am not allowed to question the "belief" of the theory. Sounds a lot like people defending a religion to me.
I applaud your questioning the theory of evolution...I think the theory as a whole is very sound, are parts still unanswered, yes, but that is the nature of science...
The answer to your question is, most organisms don't survive...time and adaptation(survival of the fittest), it took billions of years, of very tiny changes in very tiny increments...
You are correct, there are missing parts in the theory of evolution, but while the parts might change, the underlining theory is solid...
I don't put my faith in theories...I put theories to the scientific method...I think that some people might take evolution to that religious level(scientism)...To me, science is science, you use empirical data to answer questions...Belief is not provable...and faith is blind belief, these are of the religious sphere and should not be mixed with things of a scientific nature...
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